The ars linux guys sure can talk about stuff until late. In fact, there were so many presentations I’m going to have to stop, and think back to who went first.

…

I think it was Sean “Harshy” who stepped up first and gave a talk about the status of Coaster and development woes. It was very interesting to hear the developer point of view of getting a new open source project off the ground. Coaster is a gnome cd burning application that uses nautilus-cd-burn. NCB on the other hand uses cdrecord. Being built on those two layers, and both of them having their share of bugs seemed to be a big challenge for Coaster. The libburn project looked promising, but no work has proceeded on it for years.

Next was Rick “TheRock” Lull doing a cool presentation of some network tools. Nagios, NMIS and Cacti. This was an excellent description and demonstration of these tools. Cacti looks like a great MRTG on steroids. NMIS looks like clutter, but if you can get passed the cluttered interface, it looks useful. I’ve used Nagios for years, so its difficult for me to relay it in simple words. It is not difficult to configure Nagios, but it does have a steep learning curve. Once you have figured out which text configuration files to edit, things become simple.

Finally, Tatsuya “tm” Murase gave a fundaments of security talk. It wasn’t anything technical, but instead emphasized a different way to thinking about security. It was really a long list of best practices of thought. Highly relevant information for those new and serious in security.

Then greenfly played three teh_scene videos. OMG ROFL! Very funny stuff.

I was looking forward to showing off my implementation of autocomplete html input text elements, but there was no time or interest or whatever for more presentations. I think folks decided to quietly kick ban me after I started trolling peoples presentations mentioning that Mandrake does some things. I was pretty tired by this time, so I headed home in the snow!!! SNOW!!! Penguicon brought the snow!

Rewind the day 12 hrs, and I would have been just ariving at BW3s to watch the Pistons smoke the Sixers with schweeb, biokatt, syndicate, metalikop and Loraine. We ate wings, drank beer and a few of us even ate desert. I didn’t think BW3s would have a very good desert, but that chocolate fudge cake thing was awesome.

Penguicon got started today. I’m at work, but since this is taking place in my neck of the world, I am trying to be somewhat involved in the event. (crashing it)

http://www.penguicon.org/

Ars is involved.

http://wiki.arslinux.com/ArsLinuxCon2005

My wife and I made the trek (40 miles, 45 minutes) to meet the Ars folks at BW3 Novi last night. It was cool to talk with StoneTable, greenfly, and everyone else. I didn’t get to talk much with the folks at the other end of the table.

My wife loved the Fujitsu P series laptop aka fujip. It really is amazing how small it is. I want his and hers.

I get to talk geek so rarely that it was good, much needed geek talk. Hopefully this is the beginning of a good weekend.

When troubleshooting an issue with your iPod, it’s sometimes helpful to manually put it into Disk Mode.

Putting iPod into Disk Mode

1. Plug the iPod Power Adapter into an electrical outlet and connect iPod to the power adapter.
2. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
3. Press and hold the Play/Pause and Menu buttons until the Apple/iPod logo appears, then release them. This resets iPod. When you reset iPod all your music and data files are saved, but some customized settings may be lost.
4. When the Apple logo appears, immediately press and hold the Previous and Next buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears. (For iPod Software 1.0 through 1.1, a FireWire logo appears on the screen.)
5. Disconnect iPod from the power adapter and connect it to your computer.

Putting iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode

1. Plug the iPod Power Adapter into an electrical outlet and connect iPod to the power adapter.
2. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
3. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons for at least 6 seconds until the Apple logo appears.
4. When the Apple logo appears, release the Menu and Select buttons and immediately press and hold the Select and the Play/Pause buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears.

5. Disconnect iPod from the power adapter and connect it to your computer.

If you are having difficulty putting the iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode, set the iPod on a flat surface. Make sure that the finger pressing the Select button is not touching the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Play/Pause button toward the outside of the click wheel and not near the center.

If you are still unable to put iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode, use one finger from one hand to press the Select button, and one finger from the other hand to press the Play/Pause button.

I’m not as outraged as the person who wrote http://www.msu.edu/~harris131/ because I remember what the riots where like in East Lansing a few years ago. That doesn’t justify any excessive force used by police, but it does justify taking every precaution.